Ballistic impact resistant components are desirable in a variety of industrial, commercial, and military applications.
Recently, composite components formed of multiple materials having different material properties have been used. For example, a composite component may be made by combining a first material having a high hardness with a second material having a high toughness, to produce a composite component having characteristics of both materials (i.e., high hardness and toughness).
However, manufacturing composite components is often challenging due to the different properties of materials used to form the composite components. For example, different materials often have different coefficients of thermal expansion, different densities, different melting points, etc. A manufacturing process that works well for one material may not be compatible with another material. For example, if two materials have different coefficients of thermal expansion, they will expand or contract at different rates. If the difference between coefficients of thermal expansion is significant, cracks and/or voids may form as a composite component made from the materials cools, thereby detracting from the performance of the composite material.
Thus, there remains a need to develop new composite materials and methods of manufacturing such composite materials.